University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
critics: Clement BLANCHET & Jono STURT.

suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.

Olivia LU-HILL: This studio’s aim was to create a proposition for the Montparnasse Tower in Paris, infamous for being tall and out of place, the glass cladded skyscraper sits in the middle of the quaint low-rise limestone city. My project examines the issue of nostalgia and preservation historical architectural identity in a modernizing city.

The project’s proposition is based on the concepts the Flaneur, as Walter Benjamin writes in “The Arcades Project” the Flaneur translates to a stroller and existed in the late 19th century Paris as Dandy gentleman who strolled about the Parisian arcades walking his turtles without any specific destination in mind. With the Haussman renovation the arcades were torn down and the automobile was introduced, the quickened more efficient pace of life left the Flaneur’s stroll awkward, inefficient and out of place. In my project the Flaneur of the 19th century is a metaphor for historical buildings in increasingly dense and efficient cities, as taller sleeker buildings go up, older buildings are left as items that take up place to indulge in nostalgia. My project proposes a ritual for historical preservation in Paris. The proposal includes a factory in which buildings which are set for demolition would be voted on and one would be selected every 10 years to be preserved through resurrection onto a mobile platform. These building zombies wander the streets in a Flaneur-style, uprooted from their original context and without a home and with no purpose, thus embodying unwanted loitering around and haunting their original context. The act of resurrection and parading the dead has links to France through Madame Tussad who was famous for creating wax figurines of from molds and forms of the decapitated or recently deceased. The mobilization of the architecture is manifestation of the placelessness of historic building in this modernization of a city leading to a literal loitering and haunting of its original context. This ritual proposal for the modernization of Paris, seeks to both playfully depict an alternative reality while literalizing and manifesting the issue of the role and methods of historic preservation.”

sP: What or who influenced this project?:
OL-H: I grew up watching Hayao Miyazaki’s films and his methods of storytelling and character of entourage inspired many aspects of my project.

sP: What were you reading/listening to/watching while developing this project?:
OL-H: Reading Walter Benjamin The Arcades Project; Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal; and John McMorrough “Ru(m)inations: The Haunts of Contemporary Architecture.”

sP: Whose work is currently on your radar?:
OL-H: Sam Jacob, MOS Architects, and Jimenez Lai.

Nawid PIRACHA: Sometime in the near future, the high-rise tower will no longer be seen as an expression of corporate wealth or singularity. Current projections indicate a migration from suburban and rural to urban environments.

The general pursuit in the relocation is of the following: social interactivity (including a smaller domestic footprint and independence from the car) and career objections d­­istanced from the corporate and instead rooted in social aspirations.

Dead Air Space includes a school of industrial design, in which students with the above interests learn to manufacture and sell their designs. The tower’s upper half is composed of apartment units, hydroponic farms, and a gallery where the design students are able to sell their work directly to consumers, all factors that to cater to the socially conscious yet entrepreneurial new generation.

In architectural discourse, spheres have been exiled to the level of fantasy and fiction due to their habitation and construction limits. Here, they make their comeback using scale and packing as a defamiliarizing device. The building links the blank and sober extrusion of a machine with the pop and expressive geometry of spheres or “bubbles.”

sP: Whose work is currently on your radar?
NP: amid.cero9; SO-IL; Bureau Spectacular; Casey Reas; and William O’Brien Jr.

]]>http://www.suckerpunchdaily.com/2016/12/07/dead-air-space/feed/0Guinea Pigs: A Minor History of Engineered Manhttp://www.suckerpunchdaily.com/2016/12/03/guinea-pigs-a-minor-history-of-engineered-man/
http://www.suckerpunchdaily.com/2016/12/03/guinea-pigs-a-minor-history-of-engineered-man/#respondSat, 03 Dec 2016 08:01:50 +0000http://www.suckerpunchdaily.com/?p=40763new york NEW YORK

A research project of experimental history and immersive scholarship for the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, “Are We Human” curated by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley.

The naturalist, in the nineteenth century, was not only a man skilled in careful observation and documentation of plants and organisms, but also a brave traveler whose physical endurance and fortitude magnified his given bodily capabilities. . . .

In many ways, the naturalist was then a heroic explorer determined to defeat his physiological boundaries and conquer uninhabitable lands. His journeys were token of his commitment to advance the sciences and, by and large, our perception of what constitutes our world. In the twentieth century, the explorations of the naturalist resurged in the face of the astronaut and the aquanaut, who could now travel above and below the limits of the earth in regions prohibitive to man’s physiology. Outer space, the bottom of oceans, Antarctica – exceptionally unfriendly regions to the physiology of humans –were places for all that defied property and territorial commitment. In this vast, blank space, humanity had a second chance to reinvent itself from scratch.

In this context, an augmented and engineered type of man was of larger cultural interest, a new universal human subject, augmented through technological instrumentation. Unlike the Vitruvian Man, nevertheless, the figures of these engineered men were not idealizing a cosmic subject representative of humanity as a whole. The explorer of the twentieth century is a guinea pig, whose body is a test bed; he is a combustion machine, delegating human agency in measurements of input and output. Unlike the naturalist, the guinea pig resists utopia. It refutes the wholeness of the body, even ‘wholeness’ as a generic idea, and proposes in its place biotic components, in parts that can be replicated, interfaced and interconnected in endless ways.

GUINEA PIGS presents five species of such engineered men: AMPHIBIAN MAN, EXOSKELETAL MAN, EXCREMENT MAN, FEEDBACK MAN and WEIGHTLESS MAN. A series of three-dimensional immersive projections narrate the stories of these figures, as fictional characters offset from the texture of reality; like the living ghosts of archival research. The five episodes bring together the imaginary of design culture at a given moment in time with the “raw” technical investment of engineering research and development. In parallel, each Guinea Pig, is presented in narrative texts, archival material, and patent drawings suspended from the ceiling and observed from a designated station on the floor, enabling the visitor to lie down and assume a horizontal position in the exhibition space. The change of posture from vertical to horizontal turns the viewer him/herself into a guinea pig, into an object that is observed, monitored and documented by the curators.

GUINEA PIGS are not merely speculations of human subjects, but also funded experiments to create superhuman abilities documented in manufactured prototypes, reports and patents. Either drawn or merely reproduced by architects and designers, these figures illustrate that the line between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.

Gary POLK & Jung Jae SUH: In a quest to machine bewildering worlds for localized experiences, the Vessel is a conglomeration of multiple synthetic natures, constantly in flux.

The complex consists of several entities: a theater that augments the environment based on performance; a gallery space composed of multiple mobile pods traveling by tracks that plug into one-another to create new spaces with hybridized alternate climates; and a centralized foyer area containing islands and objects both reachable and unreachable.

All of these spaces are synchronized by a fiber, a mechanism derived from and following the laws of laminar and turbulence flow, that varies in density to create several degrees of interiority. The bewildering disposition of these synthetic natures is further enhanced by the fragmented exterior shell that proposes a new interiority and new threshold definitions through it’s potential for cultural supergraphics.

This project challenges conventions by blurring the line between human and non-human agency, creating a pulsing vessel of worlds – each with their own climate cycles – that may or may not be affected by human activity. Both performance and gallery art is now augmented by the fragmentation of the 4th wall, allowing the user to engage with media instead of simply observing, yet also allowing the new worlds to affect each other, creating an autonomous galaxy. Consequently, the topic of contemporary design’s inevitable historical allusions to pop-culture – especially science-fiction – is challenged through the Vessel’s language and visual syntax, and the project insists on questioning the degree to which science-fiction affects us as designers.
The Project further defined a new role for the physical model, which was Frankensteined from the early stages as part of a synthetic-material study.

The Woodbury School of Architecture Japan Travel Studio fieldwork focused on the production of a continuous drawing series exploring distinct cities in Japan: Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka.

The continuous drawings documented the ephemeral and transcendental qualities of the urbane object in Japanese culture as they affected the perception of the built environment. Students explored the idea of transecting the urban realm through isometric drawings, documenting urban[e] objects from the ubiquitous teacup and interior architecture of the tea house, to the architecture of idiosyncratic urban planning prejudices and influential Metabolist artifacts.

The isometric framework allowed for both continuity and development in the series as the fieldwork travel through and between cities. Every three days new posts where added to the studio’s tumblr site. The drawings grew in length, time and space, evolving a cultural understanding through cultural production.

During the fieldwork, two students presented the progress drawings and insights into the development of the work at SuperDeluxe for PechaKucha // Tokyo.

RepetiGrid by ArchitectScripta is hosted by the Benaki Museum, under the auspices of the Hellenic Institute of Architecture and the Athens School of Fine Arts.. It is an opportunity for architects, students of Architecture and Art, professionals designers and artists to join and exchange ideas.

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Stefan KLECHESKI, Yingjing MA, & Siwei REN: How specific can we get about the “cute”? Aren’t architects always pursuing an aesthetics of the “interesting,” “complex,” “beautiful,” “refined”? And do these sell as well as the “cute”? How can cuteness be deployed in architecture?

Is there a relationship between the uncanny and the cute? And what about that cutie, Mies? We investigate these questions through the design of an Uncannily Cute Seagram Building. The Seagram Building, the emblem par excellence of high-modernist architecture, embodies key aspects of the movement: purity of form; a replicable aesthetic, material and construction system; expression of function and structure; embrace of technological advancement in the service of social progress; and construction made possible by corporate interests. All of these factors produce an aesthetic of elegance and refinement. The Uncannily Cute Seagram Building questions and upturns these traits of high-modernism, opening a space for less commonly explored architectural aesthetics.

Additional credits and links:
Thanks to Dustin Brugman and Asa Peller at the Taubman College FabLab. Also thanks to Matias Del Campo, and all the professors who had input as the project developed—Adam Fure, Ellie Abrons, Sandra Manninger, TN Ng, and others. Also, shoutout to Marc Fornes and his dedication to properly acknowledging architectural lineages.

Constructing the Landscape
Contemporary remote sensing technologies are altering our understanding as well as our relationship with the Landscape. A digital record of the surveyed physical surface of the earth is producing a new set of images that shape our perception of the territory, creating truths that establish politics, protocols and economies across the globe. These images, and the meta-data that they contain, become the contemporary site of investigation, in which we can both retroactively analyze change on the surface of the earth and simulate projective forensic futures for specific sites.

This project collapses heterogeneous forms of data to produce speculative simulations of possible forensic futures. These become an advocacy tool to describe the system of violence exerted through the landscape by an infrastructure plan (the Pan-American project), and they suggest a reading of the patterns of displacement – of people and nature – as a continuation of colonial strategies to maintain a system of power over territory, resources, and ultimately people.

The structure of Remote Sensing Technologies
In Guatemala, Satellite imagery and LIDAR scanning are the main technologies that shape this landscape, constructing it from two radically different scales of resolution. By understanding the structure of the thick layer of information embedded in each of these surveying technologies, it is possible to define their biases as a legacy of the way in which they record space. On one hand satellite images cyclically capture multi-layered images of the earth with a threshold of approximately 0.8mt per pixel, reducing the presence of the human body to a single dot; on the other hand, LIDAR surveys record a surface-like space down to its material texture, capturing fractions of a millimeter worth of detail. It is in the gap between these two scales of resolution that we begin to construct our perception of the thick fabric of relations unfolding on the territory. Overcoming the static nature of these artifacts will allow us to assemble chains of actions between material things, large environments, individuals and collective actions.

Violence exerted through the Landscape
Ultimately the project highlights the potential of animated drawings to exploit data simulations as well as the meta-data embedded within surveying technologies to model and narrate projective futures. They become a parallel advocacy tool to the vinyl maps and boards used by local communities, as evidence of environmental violence, to expand their borders of resistance. The site of the Chixoy Dam, built between 1976 and 1983, in the midst of the Guatemalan civil war, is analyzed as a retrospective study to project the available data towards a future simulation of the Xalala Dam site, whose imminent construction is endangering the life of communities living along the river Rio Negro.

Anhuar FARAH: The drag queen is a self-identified man who has no desire to live as a woman nor become a woman, yet mocks hyper-femininity and ridicules female gender stereotypes. . . .

Drag dressing is considered a transgression because of its ability to inhabit and mock contradicting ideas.To transgress is to go beyond the boundaries set by law, discipline or conventions. Transgressing can cast new light on what is considered as the norm, and through doing so both re-energizes and prompts a definition of the new.

This thesis uses the concept of drag as a way to transgress architecture in order to create a new whole which exaggerates and mocks the stereotypes of the two contradicting architectures. Through years architecture and societies have been built upon standards, stereotypes and rules. The new whole, created through the idea of drag, will form extravagances of these stereotypes by going beyond the boundaries set by the past conventions.

sP: What or who influenced this project?
AF: Drag Queens, Florencia Pita, and David Ruy.

sP: What were you reading/listening to/watching while developing this project?
AF: Reading George Bataille, Story of the Eye; listening to Maria Felix interviews; and watching Cindy Sherman, Ru Paul’s Drag Race.

Jitendra SAWANT: In the past few decades, Gurgaon, a city 32km outside New Delhi, has risen from a former agricultural wasteland into the millennium city.

250 of the top fortune global 500 companies have their offices in Gurgaon. It considered as the IT and call center capital of India and almost perhaps of the world. . . . It is one of the fastest growing cities of India. . . .

A city which is almost entirely built by private Industry. But when you at the city closely it’s a city which is a direct result of the hyper capitalist consumerist economy. It has a private metro line, fire bridged, energy system and even security forces.

As much as this has facilitated the growth of the city it has resulted into some strange happenings in the city.

According to the Belgian philosopher, Lieven de Cauter, we experience our civilization only in capsular states. Based on this hypothesis, Gurgaon NOW asks what consequences such encapsulation – what Peter Sloterdijk identifies as spheres or foam formation, could have on our urban condition. The question is pursued through the architectural program of a city of call centers – that is, could serve as a model and organizational prototype for a city and the constant expansion of urbanization? The design tasks contextualizes the Gurgaon as a prototype relative to the existing growing cities in developing countries. The result of the design process is a strange city building whose formal principle derives from the misfit between other, different buildings and whose form is at once familiar and strange.

The project is made from merger of the existing 64 commercial building in cyber city part of Gurgaon. It has a volume of a one million cubic meters. And would be housing 35000-45000 people at large.

sP: What or who influenced this project?
JS: Peter Trummer and David Ruy.

sP: What were you reading/listening to/watching while developing this project?
JS: Reading Michael Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space and Lieven De Cauter, The Capsular Civilisation: On the City in the Age of Fear. Listening to: Massive Attack; Daddy G; Indian and Pakistani Sufi-Rock bands; Ricardo Villalobos; Solomun; and Above and Beyond.